Those companies are free to operate in China if the comply with Chinese law.
The US hasn’t issued any legal barriers for TikTok to jump over, they just straight out banned it.
The US hasn’t issued any legal barriers for TikTok to jump over, they just straight out banned it.
Which will never happen. The Chinese know that Western companies would never want to comply with the Chinese law because the law was purposefully designed in such a way as to benefit the totalitarian regime. So they were forced to quit China. This is nothing but an indirect ban. This is very common actually.
For example: India imposed a 200% tariff on all Pakistani goods instead of banning them after the Pulwama Terror Attack [1]. Why not outright ban them? Because of global trade rules that prohibit taking such measures. So imposing a 200% tariff would effectively mean a ban only. No one in their right mind would import goods/services at 200% import duty. This is what Chinese were doing to US companies the past decade. Which is why US companies left China in the first place. Because staying around and doing business in China became untenable.
[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/ind...
Windows has settings for timezone, language, currency, and more. Using the software sold in China, can you choose Taiwan or is it called Chinese Taipei? What do the maps show for the South China Sea, for the border with India, and for Tibet?
An article from December 2019. When the pandemic was in its initial stages and China was keeping it all under wraps. China had already decided to dump US companies way back then. US is more reactionary just like India. China fooled the World.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/china-reportedly-orders-stat...
Quoting directly from the article:
China’s Communist Party has ordered all state offices to remove foreign hardware and software within three years, the Financial Times reported, in a move which could hit major U.S. firms including Microsoft, Dell and HP.
The policy has been dubbed “3-5-2” because the replacement of the technology will happen at a pace of 30% in 2020, 50% in 2021, and 20% in 2022, the newspaper said, citing a note from brokerage firm China Securities. Analysts there estimate that 20 million to 30 million pieces of foreign equipment need to be replaced in China.
...
“Discrimination against foreign technology has been a part of the policy framework in China for years now, but it’s something that USTR (United States Trade Representative) is already familiar with,” Marro told CNBC.
“This might nevertheless complicate the discussions around Huawei, ZTE and other companies in terms of their access to the U.S. market. Much of the popular narrative has centered around the U.S. unfairly banning these Chinese companies from its market; at least with this story, the administration can publicly play the blame game of, ‘well, China’s doing it too, and they’ve been doing it for a long time.’”
U.S. companies like Google and Facebook have been blocked from operating in China for several years.